Instead of an Uber or a Lyft, how would you like to get around Pensacola in a flying taxi?

If everything goes according to plan for AAA Air Taxi — a new startup owned by Kathy Carlton, who also owns Brock's Auto Sales in Brent — then you'll be able to do just that at some point in the near future.

"We're getting 10 vehicles that we're going to be buying," said Brock's General Manager John James. "They're like overgrown drones on steroids, dude."

"We get you there through the air" is the slogan slapped across the website of AAA Air Taxi, which James said plans to be a 24-hour, seven-days-a-week service featuring drone-like vehicles that fly from port to port, picking up passengers and dropping them off throughout Pensacola. And they're autonomous, so no pilots.

James and Carlton don't see flying taxis as a luxury. They said they want to make the service affordable for people of all incomes, and they said they want Pensacola to be among the first cities in the U.S. to take advantage of the innovative service.

"That's our goal, is to make it economically feasible for everybody to ride it and use it," James said. "Think of this, all the traffic jams here, you're going to pay a few more dollars than a normal taxi ride, you know that, but it's going to be the new wave of transportation and I think being a tourist town, Pensacola should be right up there leading in the innovation of this new industry."

The company said it plans to have 10 landing ports in Pensacola and 10 flying taxis will navigate between them.

But there are a series of hoops AAA Air Taxi has to jump through to make this dream a reality, including approval from the Federal Aviation Administration, as well as from the city when it comes to mapping out the air tracks the flying taxis must follow while flying.

"We have to look into where we're going to put the docking sites at, such as one at the airport, at Cordova Mall, where the busiest locations are, and where to do the test with the original (flying taxi)," James said.

AAA Air Taxi has narrowed down the field to three manufacturing companies — whose names they did not want to disclose — from whom to buy their desired 10 vehicles. James said each vehicle costs about $250,000, depending on state and city requirements. And there's a $50,000 range in pricing, depending on the features and qualities of the vehicles, which he said will be equipped with eight, electric fan engines and automated speech recognition.

The company has signed a letter of intent to place an order and a deposit on one flying taxi that they plan to use to conduct test flights.

James said AAA Air Taxi doesn't want to buy all 10 vehicles at once without going through the test flight process first, especially when there's no telling when or if the city's approval may come.

"It could be two years down the road before the city gives its approval, so we don't want to invest $5 million into flying taxis we can't even fly," James said. "We don't know what their regulations are. They don't even know exactly what the insurance amounts are that you're going to need yet."

James said the company has had preliminary talks with the city, but those haven't advanced very far. City spokesman Vernon Stewart did not immediately return a phone call requesting comment for this story.

Brock's Auto Sales is the only investor in Carlton's new company at this time, but James said they've fielded "calls from everybody wanting to invest in this." James declined to name those potential investors.

Carlton recently moved to Pensacola from Stuart, where she was a business owner with her ex-husband, according to James, who added that Carlton is "serious" about financing the expenditure by herself, but would appreciate additional financial backing from investors to maximize the business.

"This is going to definitely take Pensacola to the next level, I feel," James said.